Archaic hunter-gatherers of the St. Johns River Valley were once considered the history-less multitudes par excellence, who flourished for millennia with little change. However, mortuary traditions, object itineraries, biographies of place, and footprints of landscape terraforming reveal how Archaic communities actively cultivated associations with ancient social landscapes whose relevance was deeply imbricated with the cosmology of watery underworlds. In this chapter, I consider how Archaic communities uncovered and re-created their own histories as modes of social change. Even at the scale of the southeast, communities leveraged their historical entanglements with a sacred geography to structure and provide rationale to gatherings.
